Postmortem: Arctic Runner

Well, I went and fell off the blogging wagon—haven’t posted anything since Ludum Dare. Sorry about that. There—I’ve admitted my mistake, and I’m blogging again now. So let’s just put this whole thing behind us and never speak of it again, okay?

You’re not perfect either, you know. Remember that time you said that really dumb thing in front of all those people and everyone looked at you funny? (You didn’t think I knew about that, did you?)

Anyway, this past weekend I made a game called “Arctic Runner,” which you can play HERE for free. It’s the eighth entry for my One Game a Month challenge.

Recently, I’ve been really working hard on Flibitz, our upcoming iOS release. That meant that I was not able to spend as much time on Arctic Runner as I would have liked, but I knew that going in and planned accordingly.

Because of the constrained timetable, I decided to keep the gameplay ultra-simple. Luckily this was right in line with the One Game a Month theme for September: “Thirty Seconds.”

I did spend quite a bit of time on the graphics (again, hand-painting everything in ArtRage), and a moderate amount of time on audio. I’m pretty happy with the results.

Admittedly, the gameplay is too simple, but I think this game does a great job of setting the scene and conveying a sense of drama. I have a lot of ideas in the hopper, so these tiny games are a great way to prototype pieces of them. I’m really liking this art style and am definitely planning on creating a commercial project with this look and feel at some point.

In an ongoing effort to redeem myself from my failure to blog consistently, I will be continuing my “Dev Log Catch Up” series. I’m looking forward to getting you up to speed on what has been happening with Flibitz. Who knows? There may even be an announcement about a new beta version that’s right around the corner. You never can tell with these things.

I’m also looking forward to telling you about a very, very cool-looking game called “Violent Sol Worlds.” I’m not affiliated with the team making Violent Sol Worlds, but I want to start blogging about other indie dev projects, and this one has definitely caught my eye.